I work for the Computer Science department at the University of Minnesota. My computer work right now outside of systems administration include working on Debian, writing small gtk apps to get better at c and gtk, and packaging up things when I get the time (currently I should be doing web100, but I've been putting it off). I'll be joining lots of Debian developers at Debconf2 in Toronto.

Projects

Recent blog entries by dieman

Well, another week gone. I've gotten a little web100 work done today towards packaging. I think I'm going to try and finish up getting the userspace applications packaged tonight. I hope that any patches I send upstream will actually be fixed, though. I probally need to update some of my other packages, too.

Debconf2 is coming up fast, I need to figure out what I'll be up to on Thursday. Probally mostly getting from the airport to yorku. I'll probally hook up with people on IRC and go out for dinner at the least. I need to find something touristy to do too.

This week I should find some time to start hacking on autoinstall again and start adding features. I keep on looking at systemimager instead of installing packages every time but I think I'm really going to stick with installing packages every install.

Well. I got married to Kristine! It was on May 18th. Pictures can be found here or here (thanks superq!). Our honeymoon pictures are here Otherwise, Kristine and I have been trying to pay down our bills and keep the house clean. The clean part is really much harder than it sounds. Three cats don't help, but most of it is really just how much I end up deticating my time to things other than cleaning.

We have a Golden Retriever coming around July 25th from Rebelcreek. We still need to come up with our kennel name and come up with a website for the whole thing. Kristine says she will start showing with the dog in December, so I guess I've got until then to get things finished.

My brother graduated from High School and is going to be going to Art School this fall. I'm pretty excited about it as he is going after what he really wants to do rather than not trying at all and going into another field. The school has a high job placement rate, but just like every other school its got a dropout rate of over 50%. Its a figure many people don't realise when they send their kids off to Higher Ed. No more social promotion here.

Geek Stuff

I wrote up some infrastructure to deal with keysignings that I'm going to use for Debconf2. I've hit some bumps, but everything seems to be going well now. It allways seems that using email for this sort of thing is right until you remember how insane MIME and QP and stuff is and how nice it is to have Perl. I'm dealing with MIME in a broken way, but it handles QP fine now and I've not seen any more issues from the script. I need to send out another message to -announce about the better procedure that someone on -devel enlightened me to for large keysignings.

Politics

The whole Apache exploit thing where people want to hang ISS for early disclosure is pretty crazy. These people havent figured out yet that the fact that GOBBLES has posted at least one type of working exploit means that at least one greyhat group has known about this and has most definately shared it with other unknown actors for at least a month or two. This sort of disclosure preempting vendor response is definately warranted if ISS complained to Apache first that there was most likely something out there anyhow because of two whitehat groups hitting upon it in parallel. In other thoughts, upgrade when you see the advisory, don't wait two days. More so if you host evil identification data, personally identifiable medical information, or other evil stuff. Oh well. I know at least one (ElectricElf) disagrees with me here. There is probally more.

So like, Ive been like, not updating this or anything.
I've been busy with work, school, life, etc. Moving into a
house in April, though! I can't wait to have my own
geek-room. :)

3months and 3 days until I get married! We still need to
get some stuff going, but most of the plans are set. Well,
except for that whole honeymoon thing....

Project wise I've been messing with autoinstaller and a
wireless scanning application for the ipaq. The
autoinstaller stuff is work related, so it gets done much
faster. Even while learning python on-the-job! I wish I
had enough time to deticate to get the
ipaq stuff done faster...

Well, all goes well. I've got a few project gelling up
in my head lately. One is working on the placement test
code. But thats not Free Software. Otherwise, I'm looking
into 802.11b technology still... But school is taking up too
much of my time to be effective right this second. My perl
coding is going well, I released dyn-dns-bind8. My next
perl feat will probally be something to collect usage data
for named virtual hosts.